Reeves: “The line-up for PSP in 2009 is two or three times stronger than it was last year”

SCEE president David Reeves has admitted that PSP performance has not been good enough but promised a stellar line up for 2009.

“The competition has been such that publishers have had four consoles, plus PC, to publish for. They did not put their chips on PSP, certainly in the US and Europe,” said Reeves when asked about why he thought the PSP’s performance had been lacking.

“In Japan, a lot of publishers put their chips on PSP. So games like Monster Hunter, Phantasy Star Portable and Dissidia have caused enormous spikes for PSP in Japan. But there haven’t been big platform drivers in Europe.

“Now I can look you in the face and say, the line-up for PSP in 2009 is two or three times stronger than it was last year, ” said.

“We ran out of steam on games around August, September last year. We didn’t have a Monster Hunter or a Dissidia. But probably from March to July, you’re going to see that type of thing starting to kick in.”

Eurogamer then confronted Reeves with the fact that 185 DS games have been announced compared with 44 for PSP. To that Reeves responded: “It depends on the quality of the games, doesn’t it? People come out on DS and want to compete against Nintendo first-party, and that’s a tough thing.

“It’s like when you watch six year-old boys play football, and they all follow the ball right the way across the field. Sometimes developers and publishers do that, and that’s what they’ve done with DS.”